Another variant is Jolokia's JVM agent which does not need any special container environment. The only dependency is on Oracle's JDK 6 or later as runtime, since it contains a lightweight HTTP Server used for exporting the Jolokia protocol. This agent is the most generic one which can instrument any Java application using a JDK6. It is suitable for situations where the other agents don't fit. Also, it can be used for dynamically attaching an agent to a running Java process.
For using this agent, the following argument to the Java application to instrument has to be given:
-javaagent:/path/to/jolokia-jvm-<version>-agent.jar
By default, the agent will listen on port 8778, but this can be configured as well as other aspects like authentication:
-javaagent:agent.jar=port=7777,host=localhost
-javaagent:agent.jar=config=/path/to/config.properties
Options are used in the given precedence, the former overwriting the later values.
For attaching the agent dynamically to a running Java process, the following command can be used to get a quick help
java -jar /path/to/jolokia-jvm-<version>-agent.jar --help
For more details and usage examples please refer to the reference manual.